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Paul Taylor, titan of American dance – obituary

Paul Taylor and members of his dance company during a rehearsal in New York in 1972

Telegraph Obituaries

3 September 2018 • 2:50 PM

Paul Taylor, the choreographer and dancer, who has died in New York aged 88, was the last of the titans of early modern American dance, developing a new art form that tended to swing between radical experimentalism and psychological extremity.

Not minimalist like Merce Cunningham, nor mythical and narrative like Martha Graham, nor classical like George Balanchine, Taylor created his own powerfully individual oeuvre.

A muscular swimmer turned choreographer, Taylor created 147 dances over six decades. They ranged from experimental work where nothing happened at all to dances, set to Bach, Handel and Stravinsky, packed with athletic grace, lyricism and sometimes comic capers.

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Paul Taylor, the choreographer and dancer, who has died in New York aged 88, was the last of the titans of early modern American dance, developing a new art form that tended to swing between radical experimentalism and psychological extremity.

Not minimalist like Merce Cunningham, nor mythical and narrative like Martha Graham, nor classical like George Balanchine, Taylor created his own powerfully individual oeuvre.

A muscular swimmer turned choreographer, Taylor created 147 dances over six decades. They ranged from experimental work where nothing happened at all to dances, set to Bach, Handel and Stravinsky, packed with athletic grace, lyricism and sometimes comic capers.

Love, ambiguous sexuality, family dysfunction, religious intolerance, the bitterness of war, and even insects were subjects, demonstrating new possibilities for modern dance, with musical response and natural human behaviour claiming equal place with more conceptual ideas.

Born during the Depression on July 29 1930 near Pittsburgh, Paul Belleville Taylor Jnr was the only child of Elisabeth Pendleton’s second marriage, to Paul Belleville Taylor, a physicist. Mrs Taylor already had three children by her first marriage, and when Paul Taylor Sr lost his job, she became the breadwinner.

Paul Taylor working on a piece with the dancer Amy Young at his dance company's studio in New York in 2009
Credit: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times/Redux/eyevine

Soon afterwards, the father left home after becoming over-intimate with his eldest stepson, and young Paul grew up in the Brighton Hotel, Washington, where his mother ran the dining room. He spent periods living with his various older siblings, and after getting caught stealing was sent to a corrective school.

He won a swimming scholarship to Syracuse University, but at 21 had what he called “a flash” that he had to train as a dancer, and took his first lessons.

Despite his elementary knowledge, he won a dance scholarship to New York’s Juilliard School, where he first encountered Martha Graham’s modern dance technique. When the choreographer saw his 6 ft 3 in swimmer’s physique, she told the teacher: “I want him.”

At Juilliard he studied ballet with the British choreographer Antony Tudor and imbibed radical ideas from Doris Humphrey, and Merce Cunningham, who was exploring minimalist abstract ideas with John Cage. Experimental dance had yet to catch on, however, and Taylor’s first professional dancing job was as a gorilla, eating a banana and prancing about in a television commercial.

He also bluffed his way into a spot in Jerome Robbins’s Peter Pan and appeared alongside the tenor Lauritz Melchior in Arabian Nights, dancing in the dung left by the elephant Melchior was riding as he sang.

Laura Halzack and fellow members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in Syzygy at the David H Koch Theater in New York, March 21 2012
Credit: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times/Redux/eyevine

Between studies, Taylor joined Merce Cunningham, then embarking on his own radical path in choreography. One night, however, Taylor was dropped from Cunningham’s show – for which he had learnt multiple difficult parts – because of the roll of the dice (Cunningham’s favoured method of determining choreography, music, performers and scenery). Taylor told Cunningham that he could not leave his career to the mercy of chance decisions, and left.

He took up Martha Graham’s offer and stayed six years with her, often cast as the ageing choreographer’s token hunk in her Greek tragedies: as Aegisthus in Clytemnestra, Hercules in Alcestis and Theseus in Phaedra. For Martha Graham, men were “something large and naked for women to climb up on”, Taylor wrote in his 1987 autobiography Private Domain.

When Graham and Balanchine were commissioned to collaborate for a New York City Ballet creation, Episodes, Taylor was cast by Balanchine in a solo in which the ballet master explored modern moves far away from his usual accent. Balanchine told him the mood to inhabit was that of “a fly in a glass of milk”.

On the strength of Taylor’s performance, Balanchine asked him to join the City Ballet, but Taylor, who had begun attempting his own choreography, declined, preferring to set up on his own.

The names of his early collaborators would become a Who’s Who of the modern arts, with dancers including Pina Bausch and Twyla Tharp – both later renowned choreographers – and designers such as the young abstract artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. (Taylor, Rauschenberg and Johns had originally earned money together window-dressing in Manhattan – one Tiffany’s display they made was simply a pile of soil with diamonds strewn across it.)

Taylor initially attempted to be fashionably abstract. His 1957 full-length choreographic debut, 7 New Dances, included a motionless duet, which was reviewed by the Dance Observer critic Louis Horst with a blank space.

It made Taylor’s name, however, and he then rapidly evolved a style combining acrobatic physicality, emotional lyricism, dark humour and musicality – qualities not then much in vogue but which swiftly gathered both popularity and international acclaim.

His early dance to Handel, Aureole (1962), was as approachable and lyrical as 7 New Dances had been forbidding, and became a world favourite. Rudolf Nureyev begged to perform in it.

Later masterpieces include Esplanade (1975), a remarkable crescendo of simple walking, running and hopping steps to Bach, his 1980 setting of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as a gangster farce, and the poignantly humorous Company B (1991), a homage to the Andrews Sisters and young soldiers of the Second World War. The New York Times described him as “among the great war poets”.

Paul Taylor in New York, 1969
Credit: John Lent/AP Photo

Taylor’s versatility of expression extended from the genuinely funny, in Cloven Kingdom and Funny Papers, to attacks on religious zealotry in Speaking in Tongues (for which he won a 1992 Emmy award); the dark emotions of Black Tuesday (2001), which expressed Depression-era poverty; and Promethean Fire (2002), interpreted by many as a reaction (denied by Taylor) to the September 11 terror attacks on the US.

His last premiere, earlier this year, was Concertiana, one of 10 new works created in the past five years.

Taylor himself danced until 1975, when undiagnosed hepatitis caused him to have convulsions during a performance in New York.

His company debuted in London at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1964, and in Edinburgh in 1966, but its visits to Britain were rare. However, Rambert Dance and London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet) were among the many companies who performed his dances.

As well as his autobiography, Taylor published a collection of essays, Facts and Fancies (2013). He was also well-known for his extensive insect collection.

Among his many awards, he was a Commander of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1990) and was appointed to the Légion d’honneur in 2000.

In the mid-1950s Taylor rescued a deaf-mute man being beaten up in a bar; George Wilson became his lifelong companion until his death in 2004.